Not "For The Children" But For A Child

"Between his soundcheck and our interview, a Gibson representative asked Paul to sign a Les Paul guitar that would be given to a leukemia fund. And after a 1998 concert at the Iridium, Paul spent a good ten minutes talking to a guitar-playing child who was attending via the Make a Wish Foundation. Paul asked him what kind of guitar he plays. When informed that it was a cheap imitation of a Les Paul, Paul asked the parents for the child's address. It's a safe bet a real Gibson Les Paul guitar arrived shortly thereafter. "

(Ed Driscoll at Blogcritics)

Good for you, Les. "A man never stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child."

Beyond that, I'll only say that "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

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I Get The Picture

Never believe it until it's officially denied.

I wonder who the the hell she thinks she's lying to.

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Morons In High Places

Natalie Solent has her eye on the details that make up the Big Picture and she is absolutely right.

I'll only add that -- absent adherence to the principle fact that the state has no place in the affair that she points out -- whole swathes of the State Department should be instantly sacked for aggravated presumptuous stupidity.

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This Is Simply Pathetic

With all the certainty possible anywhere in the universe since Heisenberg became the high-priest of apologists for incompetence, anyone nervy enough to try to crank up a list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" is going to draw considerable fire. Of course, there is more than enough weezil-room in that word "Greatest", which really has no meaning whatever in this context. We're talking complete epistemic vacuum, here, designed to suck the silly straight into the narrow gas-lit downlands of raw sensation, without serious resort to brainpower.

All that said, however, I'm just here to point out that Rolling Stone isn't even worth a laugh anymore. There is no reasonable standard available to a live human being by which fucking Kurt Shotgun-Boy Cobain can be rated at #12 on a list like that. He shouldn't even be in the same building while Chet Atkins is left cooling his heels out in the parking lot.

Those people are just assholes and waterheads, and their list is eloquent testament.

I will say, however, that Pete Townshend makes a compelling case for Jimi. I believe him when he says, "He was bigger than LSD."

It is an enduring tragedy of the era that he wasn't bigger than barbiturates.

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Shooting At Thieves

"We have no one policy," Van Driel said, meaning there is no formal protocol. "We try really hard not to use somebody's water without their approval."

This is the height of lying weezling. What Van Driel -- of the United States Forest Service -- deliberately ignores is that the USFS had a whole year to pay Arizona rancher Fred Conway for the water that they'd stolen from him the first time. When they failed to dispatch that responsibility, Mr. Conway did the eminently reasonable thing, which was to inform them that they were not welcome to his water, and that they should not come back.

If they had conducted themselves like responsible human beings (which is far too much to hope for in the case of bureaubots), then their helicopter wouldn't have gotten shot at when they came back to steal from him again.

Fred Conway is no threat to anyone, but the state is not his friend. He did exactly the right thing.

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What To Do...

...with this little dirt-bomb?

I say: deliver him to the nearest location in the list of five hundred thousand computers that he affected, and let him face the wrath of its owner. Then, hand him off to the next one on the list. Repeat, throughout the entire list, if it takes years, or the rest of his life, whichever comes first. Let them all have their way with him. He can take his chances. He didn't get me, so I don't want my name on the indictment. (None of that "the People vs..." rubbish.)

If he survives the ordeal, then good for him. If not, it's just hard cheese.

He's the one who stepped in it, and he's the one who should walk all the way through it.

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What's Going On Here?

Do I have this right? Why is someone at Salon using Joe Conason's name in a fight with David Horowitz?

Is the notorious Clintooniac interested to find out, or what?

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Here's "Why"

Ben Kepple asks: "Why do people insist on having more bathrooms than bedrooms in their homes these days? Doesn't that seem a bit excessive?"

Lucius Beebe found the answer, long ago:

"John Markle, a coal operator who made an enormous fortune in the New River and Pocahontas coal regions of West Virginia, disliked being fenced in and had built to his order a thirty-two-room apartment on a duplex plan on New York's Park Avenue. It was too small by far. Two years later, in 1928, he moved into a co-operative apartment on Fifth Avenue with forty-one rooms and fifteen baths. He had a private telephone switchboard installed with twenty-six extensions and a round-the-clock operator. This was before large numbers of extensions were a commonplace, or the Princess handset had been dreamed of. A black and white staircase of tessellated marble connected the two floors of the duplex at a cost of $25,000. When an impertinent newspaper reporter asked how he could use fifteen baths at once, Markle snapped, 'It's nobody's goddamned business.' "

(Beebe, "The Big Spenders", 1966, Doubleday & Co., ch. 15, "Fun With Real Estate", p. 373)

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The Guns & Dope Party

Robert Anton Wilson throws his hat in the ring.

"Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don't take crap from anybody."

First order of business on assuming office: Fire 33% of the legislature (names selected at random) and replace them with full-grown adult ostritches, whose mysterious and awesome dignity will elevate the suidean barbarity long established there.

(sigh) It's almost enough to drive a man to voting.

(link by sTaRe)

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Typical

It's merely anecdotal, of course, but nothing about this, posted by Diana Hsieh, surprises me in the least. I have utterly no reason to doubt it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I live in a culture of neatly-dressed chimpanzees.

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The East Is Still Red

"This important thought is Marxism developed to suit China's reality in the 21st century, as well as a fundamental guideline for the CPC and the entire Chinese people to learn from the past and advance into the future, keep pace with the times and build a well-off society in an all-round way."

That was Hu Jintao, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and president of China, speaking at a symposium at Beijing in July. His subject is "Three Represents theory", a new commie shuck & jive roughly analogous -- so far -- to "The Third Way" so ardently touted by Western Morlocks over the past fifteen years or so.

While you turn that over in your mind, keep this in mind, as well. The Washington Post reports on a classic commie dogfight at the top, behind the scenes, with implications for the whole country.

Things are shaking over there, and it should always be borne in mind that we're talking about a government of bloody savages, whether people like Prudential Plc, Intel, Goldman Sachs, or anyone else believe it or not.

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"Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots"

"An apostrophe does not mean, 'Look out! There's an S coming!' "

(Attributed to Dave Barry)

Do get it straight, already.

(linked by Arthur Silber)

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Pretty Tanks

"The Libertarian Party is a tank covered in purple polka-dots with a bunch of daisies sticking out the gun-barrel, driving on velveteen treads. It pretends not to be a tank, and its current drivers have even managed to fool themselves. It nevertheless enters tank races where it perpetually loses to tanks which drive and shoot like real tanks. The only way the LP tank will ever win the race is to drop its facade. The question that is never posed to the LP, save by me and few others, is why it keeps entering tank races if it's not a tank. The only conclusion I can come to is that they're idiots."

(Mike Schneider, expounding on my tank metaphor)

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Important Information

Everyone should go pay close attention to Frank's 'Rules of Proper Gun Safety'.

Better safe than sorry. That's what I always say.

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This Year's Leading Candidate

Holy shit, Meesh. You've got a barn-burner goin' on here. Nice back-hand at 'em, mate.

I've only read through about a third of it, and -- through all the horseshit here & there -- I see a couple of worthwhile commentaries, so far. "NFHale" hits a crucial point: "We have been in a state of war with socialism/communism since 1917." He only hits it halfway, though. The fact of the matter is that the Cold War started in 1789.

What's more to the instant point of this, uhm... "discussion", is that for about 125 years, there has been a strain of intellectual influence on world affairs that is the utmost of destructive naivete. It consists in the idea that every dispute can be approached with reason, and it proceeds in majestic defiance of the manifest fact that some people simply are not interested in reason.

In our time, this paper-thin fallacy is most clearly manifest in the essential amorality of the United Nations, in its refusal to evaluate nations according to objective moral criteria. "Can't we all just get along?"

Well... no. We can't. That's because some people are determined savages, who can only be met on their own terms: with outright force.

This is the thing that makes, for instance, "UN peacekeeping" such a horribly sick joke. And, so long as its premises are what they are, it will keep blundering into the kill zone. With nothing but the best intentions, of course.

Know what? If that UN Baghdad mission doesn't bag this year's Darwin Award, then the award itself is no longer authoritative.

Carry on. Y'all fight nice, ya hear?

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Memo To The Confused

"Since any animal must be a determinate being -- a specific living, biological entity -- human beings must by nature be at least numerical individuals. But beyond this, because of the constitution of their consciousness -- namely, as a faculty capable of self-motivation or initiation of its own functions -- individuality in human beings is a central characteristic. The nature of human life is necessarily that of an actual, active individual human being. (The failure to heed this point has led thinkers like Marx to endorse a conception of human nature that requires all of humanity -- species beings -- as its full manifestation. This is why the debate between the individualist and the collectivist is at heart a metaphysical debate: What is the nature of the human being?)"

(Tibor Machan - "Individuals And Their Rights", 1989, Open Court Books, p. 47)

Look, ladies & gentlemen:

> From: Melissa
> Subject: Re: [I-S] Political labels

> On 26 Aug 2003 at 14:23, Eric wrote:

>> You wouldn't call Hillary Clinton a Nazi.
>
> No, a communist.
>
>> You wouldn't call Pat Buchanan a Communist.
>
> No, a fascist.

You two are arguing over the color of the tank rolling down the street, without basically considering that it is aimed at killing you. Nothing of what you're talking about is essential to politics, today. A discussion like yours is floating in mid-air: it does not deal in principles, and that makes it insipid and irrelevent.

The principal political antagonism of the day has nothing to do with "communists" or "fascists".

The fight is between collectivists and individualists: those who are convinced that each individual human being should properly hold exclusive authority over his or her own life, and those who believe that the state -- any state -- can properly forcibly dictate mass conformity, regardless of any given individual's dissenting concepts and values.

That is the only serious political fight to be engaged.

And it refers to principles. Now, anyone can go ahead and sneer at principles as "extremist" or "unrealistic" or "utopian" or anything else, but the fact is that authentic principles -- fundamental or general truths on which abstracted truths stand or fall -- are indispensibly necessary requirements for the conduct of human life. You sneer at them at risk of your own existence. And in the very same way that the principle of gravity can instantly slice through a hugely complicated chain of applied abstractions and kill everyone aboard a falling airliner, the principles at contest in this battle have their reach, too. They extend over years and decades, lifetimes and generations, but they will have their way.

That's because principles are not merely agreeable or disagreeable cocktail-party entertainments. They are necessary intellectual devices by which we grasp facts of reality and use them to stay alive into the future.

Now: look around you. If -- like me -- you think this culture is dying, I'm here to tell you that it's because nearly no one is able to handle principles. They just keep complaining about the colors of each others' tanks.

And that most definitely includes the Libertarian Party.

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Who's Zooming Who?

At the NRO Corner, Peter Robinson refers to this as a "kind treatment".

Either Robinson is missing the point of Hitch's needle, or I'm missing the point of Robinson's.

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Bureaubots On Parade

The museum looting continues.

It's not in Baghdad, though.

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Willful Blindness

"I'm surprised that this story isn't getting more attention. But not that surprised, as sympathy for communism is still treated as an amusing foible -- rather than the complicity with mass murder that it, in fact, is.

That's Glenn Reynolds, and he is entirely correct. What he is pointing out is the whole reason for the thing that Martin Amis pointed out:

"This isn't right:

Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky.

Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky."

And this is the footnote on that page:

"When Austria's Haider praised one of Hitler's employment policies, Europe spat him out convulsively, as if he were a bad oyster. Russia's Putin praises Stalin, echoes Stalin ('to liquidate the oligarchs as a class'), and proposes to mint coins bearing Stalin's profile. He is welcomed in Downing Street, and has tea with the Queen... More substantively, between 1945 and 1966, writes Solzhenitsyn, 'eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals have been convicted in West Germany... and during the same period, in our country (according to the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court), about ten men have been convicted.' In the 1980's, Molotov and Kaganovich, two elderly Eichmanns, were living on state pensions in Moscow."

Again: this is because "sympathy for communism is still treated as an amusing foible".

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Off To D.C.

Unless something right earth-shaking happens in the next two hours, I will be on my way to Washington D.C. I'll be home Saturday afternoon.

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A Room At The Top, Please

I didn't participate in the Right-Wing Blog Poll on "The Greatest Figures Of The 20th Century", mainly because I didn't ask for an invitation that the pollsters could then have refused. I know a point when I see one, though, and Cosh certainly has one at the ready over the affair.

Back in that Millennium deal, I decided that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the most important writer of the 20th century. That, after filtering and eliminating authors for quite some time before. The thing that makes him a Great Figure is the result of what he saw and the fact that it saw him, and that result is in what he produced under such conditions. For some time, I could not understand what I'd considered an inordinate buzz over Anne Applebaum's book, which I must say I've not read. I realized that what I was calling "inordinate" was just about any buzz over anything thirty years in trail of the original genuine article, which really has not received its intellectual and cultural due to this day. Applebaum may have written a fine book, but that's not the point.

An online reviewer quotes her as asserting that "Until now, the social, cultural, and political framework for knowledge of the Gulag has not been in place." I don't undertand this. Solzhenitsyn's novels, but most of all, his "Experiment in Literary Investigation", were there in black and white three decades ago. And the thing to explain is not that all the little hand-holds were not "in place". The thing to explain is why most peoples' minds have been subject to gimping along without them for so long in the face of the known facts.

And the thing that makes Solzhenitsyn a Greatest Figure Of The 20th Century is that he was the one with the determination and fortitude to put it all together before Western ignorants for the first time. He came up with the rawest data with which to analyze the single most captivating applied political phenomenon in two hundred years. He did it while it was thinking about killing him, and at a peak of its fight for world dominion. It was a performance of splendid courage and shocking erudition. He wrote something crucial that will live for as long as people read (I know, I know, but try not to laugh), about something in our time that also aimed at forever and gruesomely failed.

Cosh makes the correct point about anyone who put Ghandi on that list over Solzhenitsyn.

His appended listlet is pretty good, too.

I would add Les Paul. It's a fact that recorded music as we've known it for a half-century would not exist without him. (Psst. -- that means: no "Beatles".)

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Danger Zone

In twenty-seven years of live show production, the point was made to me early on that a stage is a very dangerous place to work. Along the whole way, the precept has never been very far from my mind at any moment: "There are endless numbers of ways to get badly hurt, and a couple of hundred good ways to get killed out here."

I'd heard about the collapse of the supergrid at Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall, but only at a distance. By now, it's damned good to be in touch with a couple of people who were out there, because they're still alive.

Pix have arrived in e-mail: here is a look from stage left, and this is a (large) look from front-of-house. In case you didn't know, that grid is not supposed to look like that. At all.

Really hate to see it.

Cue the lawyers. It's showtime.

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On Microtext

At my very first glance at this, it occurs to me that the first, most general and pressing, question about blogs has never been resolved:

Why do people still insist on designing blogs with text that can fit on the head of a pin?

I'm looking at that on a 19" display going at 1024x768, and I'm only here to say that I would rather try to catch ants in the front yard with tweezers.

I will never understand why people do that.

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I KNOW WHAT MADE IT HAPPEN!!!

Find this guy.

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Signals

Another public-service announcement for those in the market for a nice used electric guitar:

Here is a really lovely 1953 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top. Do go see the more pictures, as well.

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Do Process ...willya?

The mighty tussle in the Peoples' Democratic Republic of California may have dropped the ball into deep legal weeds, from which, I'm sure, only community action and democracy and negotiation and compromise can retrieve it.

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Watcher Of The Skies

Dale Amon sees things in the air.

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"I Find It Quite Incredible..."

A Welsh coroner has finally seen it all and is bummed-out with the Web.

Poor guy.

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Details, Details...

"The Pennridge School District gives unlimited permission for governmental, educational, and publicly funded organizational web sites to incorporate links to the Pennridge School District web site or to web sites created under the auspices of the school district. Examples of acceptable links include the web sites of agencies such as the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the Bucks County Intermediate Unit, other school districts, the public library system, museums, and municipal governments or their agencies.

Non-profit organizations and for-profit commercial enterprises may apply for special permission to establish a link to the Pennridge School District. This request must be submitted in written form and must be signed by an officer of the organization or agency. The request should be sent to the Superintendent of Schools, District Education Center, 1506 North Fifth Street, Perkasie, PA 18944. The request should specify the purpose for link, the general content of the web page and/or web site where the link would appear, and the specific Pennridge web page address requested.

All special requests for external linkages to Pennridge School District web sites will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Criteria for acceptance will include, but not be limited to: 1) the informational and/or educational value to the Pennridge school community, 2) the existence of previous or ongoing education-related partnerships or joint projects, 3) the non-commercial presentation of the external linking web page, 4) the general suitability of the external site to the educational purposes of the school district, and 5) conformance with district standards of accuracy and propriety.

(A Bunch Of Pretentious And Clueless Waterheads)

There. That oughta just about take care of that.

(link from Volokh)

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I Can't Help It, And I Don't Care

"A policy of mandatory health insurance defies the usual political spectrum. Its universalist dimension should appeal to the left, while its market-based orientation should appeal to the right."

(That's Ted Halstead, blowing for mandatory health care insurance)

I just hate these people. These puny fools and strutting fuck-ups. I hate them. I do.

It could be argued that there is no point in hating them because they are so small, but the thing that I hate them for is that they, themselves, have made themselves that way.

It takes a peculiar ambition toward abject depths for a creature like Halstead to actually get up on his hind legs in public and equate forcing people by law with anything "market-based".

And you know what? This thing is actually getting attention. Even (cough) "libertarians" are going on about it.

I just completely despise these rotten creeps.

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Oh, How I Wish I Were Really Wealthy...

...just so I could tell that stoopid cow, Arianna, to go get fucked.

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Well, That Was Pretty Boring

It was a little after four o'clock when I was preparing a note on a news story that had all the cable anchors peering off-camera at their newswires, and then everything stopped.

It only just now started up again.

I'm just here to say that the whole thing was a right drag.

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Shoot 'Em If You've Got 'Em

"1. It just reminds you that there’s lots of this going on. I’d prefer that it wasn’t stop-the-presses news that we nailed an arms dealer. I’d like to see a little scorebox on the inside of the paper every day, telling me how many of these scumsacks they’d arrested this week."

(Lileks, on the missile arrest)

On his Point #2, I'll only say that I, personally, would bet five hundred dollars that no rogue missileer will be found dead in an alley anywhere in America in the rest of the month.

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"It'll Never Work. We're All Gonna Die."

I've not studied the proposal, but if Rebecca Carr is correct in her article, then Barbara Boxer thinks that hanging ten billion dollars worth of countermeasures on nearly seven thousand American airliners is really going to make people safe from MANPADS ("MAN-Portable Air Defense Systems").

It's going to be an even better way to drive airlines out of business, and none of it can be guaranteed to defeat a serious shot by someone who knows what they're doing with that kind of hardware. Especially if they're willing to risk capture afterward in order to get right in the sweet-spot of that kind of attack (roughly within about five to seven minutes' radius of the airport from takeoff/landing).

It'll look good to the rubes, though.

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Books Online

"Intelligence in the War of Independence"

A publication of the Central Intelligence Agency.

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On Ray Bradbury

"This is where things get really scary, because to someone reading the book when it came out, or even 20 years later, the captain's story must have seemed utterly fanciful. I remember that when I first read it, it seemed like a convenient scenario-setting device, taking some latent tendencies in society to ridiculous extremes. Today, of course, we know better, what with the increasing propensity to believe in a right not to be offended or disliked, and resulting growth of the list of recognized thought crimes. Idiots wanting to ban Huckleberry Finn because it uses the word 'nigger' may be hilarious, but they're getting the upper hand."

("The Incendiary Prophet", 1995, at The Last Ditch)

David T. Wright reviewed "Fahrenheit 451"

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The 94th — "Hat In The Ring"

Sakharov's "Memoirs" languished last night because Donnelly's "Struggle For The World --The Cold War 1917-1965" (1965) has superceded it so instantly that I haven't even listed it in the Book Corner. (Both are very good.)

However, I spent a great deal of the evening neglecting both of them, and reading Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker's World War I memoirs. I had never before read these impressions of early aerial combat by one of the all-time greats. It's quite something to do so and realize that the birth of powered flight was only about as far away from the events that Rickenbacker describes as the end of the Reagan presidency is from today. It was still a pretty new thing, and Rickenbacker writes about bringing it to war for the first time.

It's a fairly quick but absorbing read.

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DMIST

"Scientists in Manchester have invented a video camera that can 'see' through fog."

(Gizmodo link)

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Good For Vernice Kuglin

The IRS got a boot in the teeth the other day.

Vernice Kuglin was acquitted by a jury of all six counts of felony Tax Evasion and Willful Failure to File tax returns.

U.S. District Court Judge Jon McCalla allegedly exhibited a fine backhand stroke when the U.S. Attorney demanded a court order. Rare, but exemplary, I suppose.

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Out & In

Pulling out of here the other morning, I'd thought: "Hmm. Outdoor gig. Bring a jacket." Always; a rule of life: never get caught at night on an outdoor gig without a jacket. You'll end up freezing, even in the hottest summer. So, I grabbed my Kentucky Headhunters "Roadkill Crew" jacket, and when I walked onto the deck at the Wisconsin State Fair -- in the thirty-five knot wind ripping over the Milwaukee Mile -- that was the first time I knew that The Heads had been there just the night before. The local crew chief said, "Yeah, I thought you'd missed the date or something." (As if he might have been the fool in those straits, the Jid-man quipcracked, "Duh... dat's okay. I'll just work wit' deze guys.")

Dammit. So, Guys: I'm sorry I missed ya. I guess you were having lunch over near the hotel about the time I walked onstage. "It's a small road," but sometimes it just misses.

Otherwise, the whole thing was one giant inanimate objection. You know the kind of thing where all the objects in your pocket get uncannily in the way of the one you're looking for, until you finally catch it and it jumps out of your hand and then rolls under the nearest couch? It was nearly three whole days of that sort of thing -- everything little thing blowing up all along the way, through the airports & all.

(Except the show. That was pretty good. We finally yanked it into focus and that sweet little Avo Pearl console drove dimmers with perfect, lovely and matched, curves, and the whole thing went swell. Except for the follow-spotlight colors. Fred was the LD for The Spinners, and he got to list those. I would have done them differently, but they worked well, and besides: he let me have all the lekos on the front truss.

So that was cool.)

So. There. Fine, then.

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Jettin'

I'm off to Milwaukee early tomorrow. I'll be home Sunday.

Seeyalaterville.

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How Did A Person...

...this bloody stupid get into the Air Force Academy?

Wow.

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Guess Who's Dealing Dope

Suppose you sold a car to someone else, and they later found, say, more than a hundred pounds of marijuana concealed in it. What do you think would happen to you?

Well, if you're United States Marshals, you get to skate while your credulous and innocent victims get to go to prison after the dope is found later at the border.

These crummy bastards should be horsewhipped.

They won't be, though, and nobody should ever be surprised or puzzled over a lack of respect for "law & order", in a culture like this.

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Pile 'Em On

Normally, I wouldn't blog an item like this, because it's merely a breaking story and everybody will be all over it soon enough, but it concerns something gathering inertia at an enormous rate:

MSNBC just now reported that Peter Ubberoth is going to file candidacy in The Great California Advance Auction in Stolen Goods.

"Floorboards squeak, and out come the freaks..."

Was (Not Was) -- 1989

I only wish my Dad were here to see this.

The sheer hilarity of the thing might have saved his life... if he didn't have a lethal stroke behind the sickening democracy of it all.

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It's Official

"...and now it's time for me to give something back to California, and that's what this is all about."

(Arnold Schwarzenegger, picking up his election application, today)

Please, allow me to be among the earliest to point out that this person is a ridiculous moron.

No one stupid enough to not realize that he doesn't owe anyone anything for his success is too stupid to be the Governor of California. Of all the utterly ghastly and horrific premises roiling through the culture these days like shit through a goose, that one ("Oh!... I must give something back!!") is among the very most contemptible and disgusting.

Arnold Schwarzenegger will likely be a smashing success as governor out there, and what I mean by that is that everyone with a half a brain in their head should make for the Rust Belt of Pennslyvania as fast as they can.


Gratuitous Kick In The Teeth -- I must say, however, that it pleased me mightily to see Darrell Issa turn into a nine year-old girl live on camera. Yo, D.: you can't hang with the big dogs, so shut up and go mop the porch.

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Gimps at Gateway

I definitely agree with Gizmodo about the new Gateway MP3 player.

Honest to god: I am becoming utterly impossible. I have absolutely no patience with incompetence. I don't know who thought that 128-megabyte player was a good idea -- at that price -- but they ought to be on the street selling pencils by the end of business, today.

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Collusion or Conspiracy? You Decide

Bill Hobbs outlines one or the other -- or both -- involving a story that I first saw reported by Vin Suprynowicz some while ago. You didn't see it here because I'd said to myself, "Well, that's typical."

I note it here now, for fans of constitutions who may never have seen my own original truism: "If it can be written down, it can also be erased."

And don't think it can't happen where you live.

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That'll Be The Day

The ridiculous presumptions of some peoples' kids are very often worth a laugh.

What a buffoon.

(link by Dean Esmay)

Oh, Wait... -- the buffoon is an attorney. (But I repeat myself.) All is clear now.

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Well, To Hell With That

Dammit. Until today, I was scheduled to jet off to Jakarta in December for a gig.

No official word yet, and it could just be me, but I'm guessing that the schedule will now change quite drastically.

That hotel was less than two years old.

The people who did this are utter savages, and should be shot down like diseased hyenas.

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Facts Don't Matter At Law

Given the generally abysmal level of epistemic clarity in America now -- in which every hollering moron is treated with respect for his or her opinion -- it is now quite possible that if the moron across the back fence doesn't like the scent of your barbecue sauce, you could be charged under anti-terrorism statutes.

Don't think so?

Well, Eugene Volokh points to a story about a North Carolina prosecutor has charged a methamphetamine cooker "with two counts of manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon", because "the toxic compounds and deadly gases created as side products are also real threats."

Now, dear reader, put on your thinking-cap and run through this:

The dipshit District Attorney Jerry Wilson asserts a general "threat" without distinguishing the specific "threat" of a terrorist who deliberately sets out on a course of indiscriminate and general destruction amid the community at large. By that indefinable logic, any toddling geek could come along and assert a "terrorist threat" in the fact that your stereo is too loud.

It is crucial to understand that Wilson, himself, knows that the man he charged is not a "terrorist", which fact is what points to the fundamental issue in this:

Facts don't matter.

Ask yourself what roads are left when that is the prevailing condition of things.

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Not A Moment Too Soon

"The greatest change, however, is within the scholarly ranks. Microeconomists are gaining on the macro crowd, empiricists gaining on the theorists. Behavioral economists have called into doubt the very notion of 'homo economicus,' the supposedly rational decision-maker in each of us. Young economists of every stripe are more inclined to work on real-world subjects and dip into bordering disciplines -- psychology, criminology, sociology, even neurology -- with the intent of rescuing their science from its slavish dependence upon mathematical models."

(New York Times Magazine story about University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt)

It was only last night that I almost wrote about the crash of the last flying He-111 bomber in the world, and I was going to write about it in the Les Paul guitar forum.

"What the hell??" you might ask, as the tone-freaks might have, on seeing a note about a World War II Nazi bomber in their midst.

Here's what the hell: these two seemingly radically disparate subjects -- airplanes and guitars -- are actually united by principles of human action. The concrete questions that bring them into the same context are: "Why do people keep flying these priceless airplanes?" and "Do people who own any of the 1700 or so original Sunburst Les Pauls actually play them?" (Context enhancement: these guitars are now bringing prices over one hundred fifty thousand dollars. Some are approaching a half-million.)

The essential question is this: "What values are these people acting for?"

Without addressing that issue at the moment, the true fact of the matter is that those people know something that macroeconomists are never, ever, going to get through their pin-heads, which is this: they know what they're doing, in terms of enhancing their own lives, without reference to anyone else's concerns.

In all the history of economics, it is almost infinitesimally rare to find a writer who could see through the presumption that the idea of "rational decision-maker" has come to. The dead giveaway, these sorry days, can be seen in the word used in the above-linked article: "supposedly". That thing is there to let you know that it's a sham, and this is how that conclusion has been forged in the conventional wisdom: because it is a mystery to some egg-headed twit why some people behave the way they do, it (any given behavior) must therefore necessarily be irrational, despite all paper-thin pretenses to the contrary by the actor himself.

This is a huge subject. Properly understood, it goes to the reason why the single most important philosophical study of the day is ethics (what people very often also colloquially call "morals"), which is: the study of the origin and function of values. The reason why this is so important is because ethics is the whole battleground upon which all of politics is fought. Stop, look around you, and listen. All those bare-fanged noises you hear out there in the twilight of American culture are concerned with action for values. And this is crucial: not one person in ten thousand has sense enough to understand that they are almost always fought over other peoples' affairs, out of which they should properly butt.

This, of course, is because, in the fundamental nature of things, the only standard of value useful to any given individual is his or her own life.

It would be idle to speculate on every value that Jimi Hendrix derived from setting his guitar on fire. The fact is this: only he could have known. To most guitarists, however (and especially in those years), the very idea would have been horrifying. You can read that as "irrational" (which is the hook to the "supposedly" crack). And there is no serious point to trying to figure out why someone would have bid four hundred thousand dollars for that guitar at auction. One could fill a whole warehouse full of Fender Straocasters for that kind of money, so it obviously has nothing to do with a strictly utilitarian appreciation of guitars, but the fundamental fact of the thing is precisely similiar to Jimi's originally incendiary act: only the indivdual knows.

What makes these concrete examples important is that the fact stated in the last three words of the paragraph above is an immutable fact of human existence.

And it's something that has been lost in every post-Enlightenment collectivist premise, which mistakes a concurrence of certain values among individuals for commonality of values, per se among all individuals, and, therefore, subject to collectivist political approval. (i.e. -- "democracy".)

For example: because most (if not all) people value education, the presumption therefore follows that education should be subject to democratic approval in its production. And almost nobody stops to consider the implications of ethical variations over specifics like sex education or creationism vs. evolution, or the fact that these are individual values, or: what happens to individuals whose values are trampled underfoot in the might-makes-right politics of democracy. (And more: what happens to values -- as a general principle -- in conditions like that. Here's a clue: in general, the lesson that individuals take from such episodes is that values don't matter.)


If there is an important contribution for an economist to make, these days, it runs to these directions. Steven Levitt is actually engaged in philosophy, albeit tentatively and inadvertantly. (I don't believe he understands this.)

And if it is true that macroeconomics is in recession, then it is not a moment too soon.

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Where's The Justice?

Insight Magazine reports on the consequences of environmental nutbagism for the Space Shuttle program.

It's bloody tragic: not one single piece of Columbia fell out of the sky and drilled through the stark idiot Carol Browner's cork head.

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